Avalanche lily

Really, twice. First was at the end of June: I completely forgot to note it here. I took a photo of Erythronium montanum at the top of Larch Mountain outside of Portland. It was a rainy day, which usually doesn’t make for good hiking, but we were under a thick understory for most of the hike so it worked. There were vast numbers of these very delicate avalanche lilies waiting for us near the top of the mountain, all covered with droplets. They are quite charismatic.

Wandering daisy

The second time was today, for a photo of Erigeron peregrinus ssp. callianthemus. I shot this one over this past weekend hiking up on Mt. Hood. It was a glorious day for a hike, with perfect weather and clear skies. More photos from this trip are in my Flickr stream.

As always, many thanks to Daniel Mosquin of the UBC Botanical Garden and his Botany Photo of the Day, which I really can’t recommend enough. Every day you get a beautiful photo in your feed reader, along with some understanding of the natural world that surrounds us. It really is an amazing planet.

Once again it seems I owe my thanks to Daniel Mosquin from the UBC Botanical Garden for choosing my photo of Acer japonicum, the japanese maple, for yesterday’s photo of the day. That’s two in two months; we’ll see if I can make a third. If you read his comments I think that he’s completely right — there is something very appealing about the Japanese maples in the winter time, because of their architectural shapes. I took this photo shortly after a big rain, and the way the sunlight was catching the drops was so appealing that I couldn’t resist. I think that it makes the tree look somehow much more ancient than it really is.

Many thanks to Daniel Mosquin from the UBC Botanical Garden for choosing my photo of Zantedeschia aethiopia, also known as the calla lily, for today’s photo of the day. Woohoo!

For the record, I shot this image in western Australia, where the calla lily is highly invasive and is causing quite a bit of ecological upheaval in the tuart forests.

I can’t resist, this is too good to be true: there is such a thing as an urban cactus. It’s a housing project in Rotterdam, based on a cactus. By placing the balconies as the architects did, every resident gets a double-height outdoor space and more sunlight than they would with a typical balcony. I think it’s brilliant.

Yesterday Sally and I went to Sauvie Island Farms to pick marionberries, and what a bountiful harvest it was. After a few hours with only a couple of minor scratches (those things have thorns!), we weighed in with 23 and a quarter pounds of gorgeous marionberries. When they are super fresh off the plant, and are warmed by the sun, they have a wonderful musky spiciness to them that I had never quite experienced like this. To date my marionberry consumption, though non-trivial, has been through farmer’s market berries, which are usually picked a day or two before they are sold. As good as those have been, freshly picked is better.

The first batch of marionberry jam

So what do you do with 23 pounds of berries? You make jam! Sally has been wanting to try canning for a while, and so we got the equipment we need assembled, and made marionberry jam. Our first batch produced 3 large jars. Professor Snape says, “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death.” Well, without any kind of wizardly training, anybody can bottle summer. I’m looking forward to enjoying these jams all winter long.

First batch: Marionberry jam

• 8 cups marionberries
• 5-6 cups sugar
• ½ cup lemon juice
• 1 tbsp. pectin
• Big splash of Chambord

I won’t delve in to the details of the jam-making process: essentially, you boil all of the ingredients, pour the hot jam into sterilized mason jars, seal them, and drop them in to boiling water for 10 minutes to “process” them, which means driving the air out. Then, as they cool, they seal themselves. But there are a lot of tips and tricks, for which I would refer you to a good canning book. Most of them have to do with keeping sterile and how to tell that your jam will set, and not be fruit soup or jello.

The second batch was more of the same, with the pectin adjusted a little bit (to 1 tbsp), and a smidge less sugar (5 cups), to bring out the berry flavor more. It was better.

The third batch was different, and included some things we got at the farmer’s market yesterday morning.

Third batch: Modified black and blue jam

• 6 cups marionberries
• 6 cups blueberries
• 7 cups sugar
• 2/3 cup lemon juice
• 4 teaspoons of lemon zest

It’s called “black and blue” because it’s intended for blackberries and blueberries. It’s more of a purple and blue when made with marionberries. This is a spectacular jam, full of rich flavor as the blue and marion play off of each other, and the whole thing is lifted and brought out by the zest. I highly recommend it.

The fourth batch was spiced.

Fourth batch: Spiced marionberry and apple jam

• 4 cups peeled, cored and chopped apples
• 1 cup red wine vinegar
• Zest of 2 lemons
• 6 cups marionberries
• 5½ cups sugar
• ½ teaspoon each of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves

In this case, you start out the apples, vinegar and lemon for about 10 minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients and the proceeding as you would with any other jam. The spices are subtle in the finished product, and they mesh with the muskiness of the berries very well. This would be fantastic on vanilla ice cream or on cheesecake, and tastes very autumn-like because of the spices.

All in all, it’s been a very productive day; we made a lot of jam. And we’ll be sure to enjoy it for the coming months.